30 June 2012

I'm so proud to present a new internet based work by Jonas Lund. For this occasion Jonas tells us everything about this work, an online collaborative painting + gallery website where users can paint together and sell unique and exclusive pieces as real canvases. The website is http://thepaintshop.biz/. Read the interview into the post;▼ Read the interview ▼Describe the project itself please

The Paintshop is a real time collaborative painting tool offering you the possibility to sell you artworks and buy great pieces of art for very competitive prices.

TB: The following picture shows the collaborative canvas, click the image to see it.

How did the project start?

I wanted to create a self-sustaining, monetizing, factory for artistic production.

How does it work? Which are the functions the user can do.

In the Paintshop all users share the same canvas. As you paint onto the canvas, you also see other people paint. The painting can at any time be signed by one of the painters, who then becomes the owner of the piece. When the painting is signed, the canvas is cleared for all the other painters, and another painting can be produced.

The signed painting is for sale in the gallery in an edition of one. When the painting is sold, it's shipped to the buyer and the money, minus production costs and gallery commission (50%), is transferred to the owner.

Fire Walk With Me by "David Lynch"

Was your goal to find some way to sell digital art? Is this your first work related with an economical feature?

If the Paintshop can attract the right collectors and buyers, the gallery will be able to raise some profit, which will be shared across the community of authors. This is the first piece I’ve made that has a specific economic feature to it and I’m very curious to see how it will turn out, how well the paintings will sell.

big sausage pizza by Jen Chan

There is one point I really like, is that the pieces are uniques and there is an unique owner in a collaborative work! When a piece is signed and saved on the gallery the canvas become empty again, so that's mean there is not going to be a similar piece, but at the same time this could be irritating for some people who could see his/her piece under the name of other collaborator (who signed the piece first). So this is more than only a collaborative online painting, people are playing with rights and money selling the skills of other creators, How did you came to that point?

A co-creational collaborative setup, in which only one person becomes the benefactor might be really annoying to some, but it’s also the charm, you might be able to catch some really amazing paintings without having painted a single stroke. It’s quite similar to a lot of factory constructions, in which the man on the top collects all the cash when the workers only gets a fraction, or say a famous artist having his interns and assistants produce most of his work. In the end it’s not the worker who gets the money and the credits but the author who is owning the work.

Starry Nixts by Mondriaan

I noticed there are different prices for the different pieces, how do you determine the prices? What is the Paintshop Rank™?

The Paintshop Rank™ is the algorithm used to calculate the price of each painting in the Paintshop gallery. I can’t reveal exactly how it works as it would enable users to trick it, but it’s taking a lot of different aspects in consideration when calculating the price, such as author, title, quality rank, views, Facebook likes, Tweets, Artfacts ranking and Google Ranking of the author. The underlying assumption is that two general things matter for the price, the reputation of the artist and the popularity of the painting itself.

Right now the most expensive painting is ‘A River Of Pain’ by Liam Gillick and it’s going for €153,-, which is still very cheap for a Gillick piece.

TB; I just noticed the most expensive now is the following painting called Doodles by Bruce Nauman. 166€

Doodles by Bruce Nauman

Can you tell us more about the final product, dimensions, material..

Each painting is printed on high quality photo canvas, 40x50cm (16x20 inch) in an edition of one. The mantel piece picture is in the correct scale.

TB: the following picture is the online preview which provides the website for every painting to have an idea about the real size.

A digital art based research which encourages the dissemination of creative concepts and aesthetics from fields such as Computer Graphics, Internet & Video Art with a high emphasis on abstract and geometric aesthetics as well as on experimental processes and techniques